alice ladrick

so now if you googled me, something would come up other than this tumblr.

anywho, here are some poems from a series about reality tv (that i can't ever pin down a name for) in issue 8 of radioactive moat!

"We start the poem earthbound with Plath’s speaker, already a lost cause, our human signs swallowed up. We don’t get to linger there long, though; Plath reframes our inquiry with that next line.  Forget the null problem of that smile being lost, of being small and expendable—think instead about what you’re supposed to lose, need to lose. Think about your night dances. It’s a question that reminds me of that best Mary Oliver line: “And what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Except that where Oliver closes her line with a question mark, Plath closes the first part of that question with a period. This isn’t interrogation so much as observation, the hinge that first opens up the mind of the poem.

“I shall not entirely sit emptied of beauties, the gift/ Of your small breath, the drenched grass/Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies,” Plath goes on. It’s hard to know who this breath belongs to—lover? Dozing child? What matters is the filling it does, the real hold it has for Plath’s speaker, the infinite reverberation it shares with those “pure leaps and spirals.”

But our time with this sleeping other does not hold. A few lines later, we’re speeding with comets that:

Have such a space to cross

Such coldness, forgetfulness, So your gestures flake off

Warm and human, then their pink light Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

We’ve been propelled from the earth, from grasses and previous lines of lilies, into a giant of a universe to whom humanity is little more than flaking paint. But we’re gorgeous, awe-worthy paint, the source of the “pink light” that illuminates its whole depthless firmament. You—we—are at once immaterial to the comet and cometlike ourselves.

The last lines of the poem gut me. In high school, I used to write them, talismanic, in silver Sharpie on the backs of all my notebooks. Today instead I sleep under a tacked-up Xerox of Plath’s first draft, where they barely fit onto the bottom of her pink Smith College memorandum paper:

Why am I given

These lamps, these planets Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting. Nowhere.

Plath reels between scales: these lamps are planets are snowflakes; we are these beauties, we are their recipients, we are the no-place that is lucky enough to receive them.

I think of that smile in the grass, I think of those breaths, I think of those planets, those flakes. And then I think of Plath’s hair, and the real smallness of any human life, and how beautiful it is anyway, and how big the world."

So, I understand that women are confusing for, apparently, everyone in literature and the world and etc., but I guess it's weird to me to be reading an essay about Susan Howe that feels it necessary to argue that, "Typically in Howe the female runs as a visible thread (one of her recurrent images, as it has been for many women writers) through the work, appearing and receding." 

I think I understand what you mean, but this is also problematic for me. Because, do we also then say that when male writers are writing about themselves (or other men, or from a male perspective) that the image of the male runs as a visible thread in their work? Maybe we should. I just find this an odd thing to say. I kind of feel like, of course women are going to be in women's writing. Because we're women, so we see the world as women (whatever that means) and thus women are central to our thoughts and ideas. I'm not sure how they could not be. It seems like somewhat of an irrelevant statement to say that in women's work the female is a thing to discuss. But is there not anything else to discuss?  At the beginning of the essay, Golding (who wrote the essay, should have mentioned that sooner) quotes Howe's own objection to this categorization, in which she says, "women who take a theoretical position are allowed to take a theoretical position only as long as it's a feminist theoretical position, and to me that's an isolation." Golding even seems wary of pushing the issue of gender and feminism too hard in the essay, saying that, "To see Howe's use of page space solely or too persistently in gender terms would be to narrow her work, to impose on her a version of her own (admittedly arguable) complaint."